Happy 10th Birthday Apple iPhone

Ten years ago today, January 9, Steve Jobs stood on a stage at MacWorld 2007 and changed how people think about their phones.

Back then, a mobile phone was a device that (gasp!) was used to place calls. It didn’t have a touchscreen, the App Store didn’t exist nor did apps for that matter, music on a phone was a ringtone of questionable quality, and Internet access required a phone the size of two bricks with battery life of an hour at the most.

The impact of Jobs’ “three-in-one” device, as he first described it because it was a phone, a music player, and a PDA (you remember the PDA, like the Palm Pilot, right?), changed forever how people think about computers and computing.

Since the first iPhone was sold in 2007, over a billion more have followed. Now of course the focus is on what the forthcoming iPhone 8 – the 10th anniversary iPhone – will look like and what innovations it will bring. The iPhone 7 brought some innovations and some headaches, such as the removal of the headphone jack.

The iPhone 8 is rumored to sport a new type of screen that will stretch all the way across the front of the phone, leading to the removal of the home button, and other rumors say that it will introduce new “screen technologies,” whatever those may be.

Of course, who knows if it will even be called the iPhone 8. If Apple were to introduce the device today, following its current practice, it would most likely just be the Apple Phone.

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